Ziff-Davis shuts down 1UP, GameSpy as part of restructuring effort

Ziff-Davis, owner of IGN Entertainment, recently announced they will be closing three very popular video game websites in their network: 1UP, GameSpy and UGO. The decision is also leaving a number of people looking elsewhere for employment as the company...

I think I've visited 1Up about five times in its entire existence. I have never even been on GameSpy. While that's anecdotal I'm pretty sure Ziff-Davis was wondering why it was redundantly covering the video game industry through three different sites especially when IGN is the number one video game website at this moment and the other two did not even bring in probably a third of IGN's traffic.

Kinda curious though what will happen with games, that run through GameSpy as part of their online service? I'm sure not many games really do now, but that's going to likely upset some people. There's other services out there to handle it, but the fact of needing a third party because of closure?

Unfortunately, the video game industry is currently undergoing some difficult times, and those who've historically participated in the industry for the "easy money" are now having to take a hard look at their bottom line. THQ and Atari are just a few recent examples of companies who have "lost their way" in terms of providing content that gamers couldn't live without...and IMO, 1UP.com and GameSpy have been in this same category ever since they were acquired by ZD. They sold themselves to a parent company that didn't have any desire to utilize their content beyond cranking out ad revenues. They had become so bloated with ads that it made it almost impossible to visit those sites.

Regarding BlueDrake's comment...either someone will buy their service from ZD or the service will cease to exist all-together. I'm skeptical that it has the same value it once had, given platforms like Steam, so I'm thinking it's probably gone for good...but I could be wrong on this...

Anyhow, I'm hopeful that this new site called Gamacy.com will be able to infuse some "life" into this environment when it goes live later this year. The golden age of video games may be over, but that doesn't mean we can't relive it. I mean...why else did we collect those 1-UPs?

Owning multiple brands that compete against each other only works if the products being marketed have real distinction. Cars, clothes, canned soup - hard goods can address specific markets and consumers. The only way you can do this with news and information is by spinning or framing it, usually to serve an agenda. That's not what most gamers want to see. They want in-depth reviews, preferably with multiple viewpoints. They want access to gaming files without having to jump through a lot of hoops. They want forums where they don't have to worry about moderators abusing their power. And they would prefer to get all of this from a single site. Maybe ZD will take advantage of this restructuring and turn one of their gaming outlets into a real go-to destination. Certainly they'll have staff to spare, so there's no excuse for being short on manpower.

That is TERRIBLE news! Gamespy was the best place to find mods and patch downloads, guides, info and more for tons of popular games (Planet [fill in blank], eg: PlanetQuake, PlanetDoom, PlanetDuke).
The game matchmaking service was nice when it first came out but became wayyyyyy too overcrowded with crap servers and players with dummy accounts, especially when they started splitting the client to a paid version as well.

Ravik
From what I've been using, there's Game Ranger for those games you can't be without. I've seen countless Borderlands and such, there's a ton of people there so I'm using that instead. Just I'm kinda sad really.. because those services are key to some games properly functioning.

I'm looking to the future and hoping things go well. There's plenty of things on those sites, that people will miss when they close down.

Really sucks to see Gamespy go. Since they moved to PC only, they've done a really good job of looking at games under their reviews and especially their Port Authority columns, giving players a heads up on the quality of multi-platform games released for PC.

Hopefully there's a site somewhere else that does something similar that I can look at now.